In the business world, jargon means things like “deep dive“ and “low-hanging fruit”. Elsewhere, we love to use cliches. Especially baseball metaphors, for some reason: “step up to the plate,” “hit it out of the park,” “take a swing at it.”
This is exactly what the guys were complaining about in TISS Episode 207. It's especially egregious when people use jargon like "curveball" without the context of what that actually means.
In technical documentation, you lose precision when you don’t attribute the action to someone or something. And in all writing, refining your language refines your understanding of the world.
There is room for passive writing, but less of room than most people think.
you should understand why you shouldn’t use passive voice in your writing. It’s not just “bad style.” Passive voice obscures who or what is performing the action.
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I suspect that this is because, when we speak colloquially, we don’t pause at that point in the sentence.
Makes sense, since we're taught to place commas where we would naturally pause in speech. But we often don't, and so we have lost commas.
When I edit someone else’s work, my number one quest is to remove words. Eliminate the fluff.
This is clever, and connects to the advice from "On Writing Well"
I also think that different genres inform each other. There are principles I’ve taken from fiction writing that make my technical language even clearer, and learning just how much people skim when reading technical documentation has improved how I format and write things like emails.
Never thought about it like that. Applying what you learn for one format to strengthen others.
Much of this advice applies across genres. Personally, I wrote academic papers in college, write poetry and short fiction in my free time, and write technical documentation for work, and I’ve applied the same basic editing techniques to all.
I wonder if this changes the style of the written piece 🤔
German is a reasonably easy gateway language to Europe. If you know German and English, it will be easy to pick up Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Also Luxembourgish and Afrikaans.
This is a very clever idea – gateway languages. Learn one to make it easier to learn others because they share the same root.
In 1795 what we would now recognise as a modern pencil was created when a French scientist and military officer encased sticks of graphite and clay in a wooden case.The officer Nicholas-Jacques Conte received his patent for his creation the pincel in the late 18th century, but he was not the first person to actually create a writing tool which consisted of a piece of lead encased in another material. When the deposit was initially discovered in England the locals would wrap it up in sheep’s wool to avoid marking their hands or damaging the sticks and graphite was first sandwiched between wood in the 1560’s by Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, in Italy.
So, pencils were a result of war and not wanting to be reliant on imports from the enemy.
Despite it once being a scarce and valued resource, the pure graphite discovered was in such abundance that Elizabeth I had no problem with using it in the production of military hardware, such as cannonballs. While they were willing to use it to suit their purposes, at the time it was not realised that what they had discovered was in fact graphite, which had not been named yet. They thought it was lead.
This is why we call it lead!
Tiddlywiki's name suggests it is some sort of toy
I wonder if it could be used to make a Myst style game. I know that Downpour lets you do that, but this could be a fun alternative.
Making art out of an invisible world that shapes human health and disease.
Apparently, there is a bonus video for The Fountain where they show how some of the special effects were made using bacteria and chemicals.
via a HN comment